Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
When speaking to Game Informer, Jeff Kaplan revealed that heroes in Overwatch could eventually be retired after more heroes are released. “We would leave the door open to that. I think the fact that we chose the business model we did – that the game comes with all the heroes and we’re giving you everything [extra] for…
Warlords of Draenor, World of Warcraft’s fifth expansion pack, was met with buzz and approval of fans and critics alike when it released in November 2014. I was one of those critics, laying effusive praise (and an extremely high score to match) at the expansion’s feet in my review. It wasn’t just player and critical…
Kotaku, alongside Polygon and a handful of other similar sites, has developed a bad reputation with gamers because of efforts by a few of its writers to inject “social justice” politics into the culture and discussion surrounding video games. What gamers want to do is simply play video games and visit websites to discuss the…
1. No Man’s Sky is a small videogame made by a tiny, indie studio that, like most small indie videogames, is clearly trying to achieve a very specific experience for a very specific audience. No Man’s Sky is a massive, triple-a videogame being released by Sony on a disc for a full sixty bucks that,…
Some relatively minor tweaks aside, Overwatch’s cyborg ninja dragon blender Genji hasn’t changed much since launch. Over the past few weeks, though, I’ve come across dozens of threads begging Blizzard to nerf Genji so hard he starts throwing rubber ducks instead of ninja stars. What happened? In hero-based games like Overwatch, there’s always a “nerf…
Overwatch’s competitive season two patch just hit the public test servers, and it’s a doozy. Nerfs, buffs, laughter, tears of delicious, delicious salt—it’s all here. The centerpiece of this PTR patch is, of course, competitive season two. The skill rating system has been overhauled and divided up into tiers, and sudden death is dead, unloved…
Blizzard team shooter Overwatch is a game designed around heroic moments. It hands players ample opportunity to sacrifice their kill counts, their glory, and the characters themselves for the greater good, to be immortalized in the match’s signature “Play of the Game” moment shown to every participant after the dust has settled. Oftentimes, this highlight…
Blizzard snuck a hilarious gag into the patch that hit the Overwatch public test realm today. The change automatically edits the text chat of anyone who types a certain phase into the match channel—don’t worry, you’ll only be affected if you’re a jerk. As Eurogamer noticed, if you type “gg ez” (as in, “good game,…
Art by Sam Woolley. The Deus Ex series is known for a lot of things: Cyberpunk conspiracy intrigue. Player choice. Overcoming life’s cruel obstacles by stacking hella boxes. But mainly, it’s known for air vents. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to understand how they work. Deus Ex is infamous for its use of air vents as portals…
For the past seven months, I’ve been talking to the people who have been making Star Citizen. This includes its directors, a number of anonymous sources who’ve worked on it, and the man who drives the whole project: Chris Roberts. From the outside, Star Citizen appears to have been wildly successful; to date, it has raised more than…